Wednesday March 22, 2006 10:15 pm

Samsung 32GB Solid State Disk

As computers get faster, one item has always been the bottleneck in the quest for ultimate speed - the hard drive. Great strides have been made to bring hard drive speeds up including denser platters, increased rotational speed, and faster interfaces. Yet it still comes down to the inherent limitations of moving parts. Solid State Disks (SSD), which are drives with no moving parts and are composed entirely of memory chips, are the equivalent of storage nirvana.

Samsung is a major player in the memory industry, and their NAND chips are in devices of all kinds. They’ve now released their new 32GB SSD for the mobile market, with read speeds 3X faster and write speeds 1.5X faster than traditional drives. Weighing only half of a comparably sized hard disk drive and consuming only 5% as much power, the drives will be a boon to laptop users everywhere. There’s no word on pricing as of yet, but don’t expect them to be inexpensive.